Understanding consumers requires more than mere demographic segmentation by age and location. Yet surveys and focus groups take too much time and too much investment to facilitate. Today, thanks to mobile devices and social media, it’s easier to glean insights about consumers and analyze their personalities by diving into and dissecting online conversations and reactions.

This real-time personalization is what we, at Mattr, are betting on. Marketing is about painting a story with the consumer by building the right campaign for the right audience.

A few years ago, our team identified the big 5 personality traits we saw in social media users by analyzing only their posts: extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, consciousness, and openness. From there, we used an expanded brand segmentation model geared towards brands specifically, which are described as either wholesome, daring, reliable, sophisticated, or rugged.

These descriptions then mapped out to specific personality types. For instance, wholesome people generally have high levels of agreeableness and high levels of emotional stability, but low levels of neuroticism. Or for the daring descriptor, this might capture individuals who are spirited, imaginative, and generally up-to-date. Generally, they possess high levels of openness and low levels of conscientiousness. Using similar techniques, we were able to analyze someone values on social media based on STEEP, which is an acronym for: Social, Technological, Environmental, Economical and Political. We learned to identify how green/ environmental a consumer might be, or how budget-conscience they might be.

Integration

Let’s not jump ahead and forget demographics altogether. Age and gender play an important role in the output analysis of certain psychographics. We also consider the differences in industries. Certain clusters of traits will attract certain industries and not others, and vice versa. For instance, Red Bull and Disney will likely not have audiences with the same cluster of traits. So we have to make sure that we’re making the correct correlations with all the variables intact.Brands such as Best Buy have used psychographics to plan out new store layouts. But with companies that are new to the game, it’s our job to educate and provide proof that this concept works.

Why Does This Matter?

Companies are spending a lot of money on social media and it’s getting more difficult to see the return in value. They’re beginning to take it a level up with influencers by using the data we supply them to craft their message that fit their audience’s values.Similarly, we encourage our clients to create content that specifically targets their consumer’s personalities.

Privacy Issues with Psychographics Data Mining

Luckily, we haven’t heard from anyone concerned about being observed by marketing companies. Generally, people know that if they’re tweeting, it’s in the public domain. They could certainly make their tweets private. In fact, we used our own tools to boost our own marketing efforts by just reaching out to a select group of SXSW influencers. We heard nothing but good things from each of them. At some events, when we talked about using social data and money, we heard things like, “Oh wow I didn’t know this was out there.” We’ve progressed to a point where people generally know that their data might be used for those purposes.There’s so much data available now that you just have to filter it down or look at different pieces at a time. The technology is getting better and more advanced to the point where you can use and process all this data quickly. Validation is becoming a lot easier.

What we should remember is that a consumer is a real person and they want to hear from other real people. Exploring psychographics for your influencer marketing efforts can give you the advantage when optimizing your message.